Although Bitcoin has been the most volatile in the past few years, yet this has not deterred the criminals from collecting bits from the Bitcoins. When we talk about extortion, we have seen the emergence and effectiveness of Ransomware using Bitcoins and other forms of crypto-currencies. We have also seen Crypto-Currency Miner (sic.Monero) being deployed on hacked servers/systems, so as to take advantage of the computational resources and generate crypto-currencies. However, lately, we have seen a rising trend in extortion emails, asking for Bitcoins.
These emails are in plain text format and warn the recipient of a malware being deployed on an Adult Porn Site, furthermore, in the mails, it is also explained in brief how the recipient’s, the webcam was hacked, keylogger was deployed and the login credentials were stolen. The email also explains that a video was captured while they were busy visiting the Adult Porn site and the recipient is threatened with dire consequences viz. sharing of the video with those present in the stolen address book.
Similar to Ransomware and Miner Attacks, this scam also relies on the anonymity provided by crypto-currencies. It’s a simple plain text threat, based on the premise that the recipient has visited some Porn site. The criminals have in most of the cases, successfully invoked the aspect of fear and social stigma into the psych/mind of the email recipients.
During the course of research, we came across numerous wallets with one of them (3FJDeT2E1fWb4oZBeub4MH9ennUp5e4QG6) having received around 31 BTC and were then sent to other wallets. The criminals have sometimes transferred the BTCs to Escrow Accounts / Exchanges to further anonymize/convert the BTCs into cash. At the existing exchange rate of BTC, the wallet was worth 1,49,09,139 INR and thus the Spam Campaign can be considered highly profitable and successful.
